


The places you will be from.

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: Settle in and find your home [14]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Sam Wilson is a mental health professional, Sam has Steve's back, but Sam also has a life of his own, toxic families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 07:10:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13875798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: After a beat to let that sink in, Sam says, "Swap coffee for drinks?""What a smart man you are," Laura replies. "I'll buy."





	The places you will be from.

**Author's Note:**

> The day after [Helping more helpfully than cats.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5337956)
> 
> Cn for involved discussion of a case that's not going very well, and the toxic dynamics and actions of some people involved, and no good answers.

Sam's day back at work is pretty uneventful: none of his stuff caught fire while he was in New York, figuratively or literally, and in fact one of the guys he'd been most worried about, Greg, had a major breakthrough and some really good luck on top of it - called his family, and got a positive and pretty damn understanding response, and is going to go have lunch with his oldest daughter on Thursday. 

And was smart enough to go back to the halfway house and stay there all night after he called, so that the release in tension and new anxiety didn't end up with that one drink that arrives in twelve glasses. Sam hopes he can keep it up, but even thus far, that just about counts as a damn miracle. 

He spends most of the day catching up on emails, returning calls, about five minutes on the phone carefully not asking someone who was supposed to be helping one of his cases with a job transition what the hell they were thinking and if they somehow contracted Terminal Idiot's Syndrome while he wasn't riding herd on them, _again_. 

But he expected that one. 

He does one assessment interview with a young man who Sam's actually pretty sure will do well once he manages to get his feet under him again, and then goes back to email, paperwork, and one more phone-call to the guy he didn't yell at. 

He also shoots Laura an email asking if she's got some time to talk. 

Laura's answer is to suggest going to get coffee after work; normally Sam's got a group on Tuesday evenings, but this time all but two already sent advance notice they wouldn't be there - different reasons for each, from a kid in the hospital to an unexpected funeral that needed out-of-town travel, and a few more mundane things - so Sam's already contacted the last two to see if they'd rather come with just the two of them, or skip this week. 

Both'd been pretty emphatic about the latter, and Sam's not surprised: they're also both people who prefer to come to support _groups_ because when there's at least seven people in the room the focus isn't on them unless they want it to be. He checked to make sure they were both doing okay, in general, reminds them to put the next date in whatever calendars they use so the change in routine doesn't mean they miss it (directly in one case, casually in the other). 

So he says _sure_ to Laura's email. 

When - about the time he's finishing up and getting ready to go see if she's done - Laura knocks on his office door and opens it without waiting, Sam looks up and feels his eyebrows rise. 

"You look like hell," he tells her, honestly, and Laura finishes stepping inside with a thin smile. She closes the door behind her and folds her arms. 

"Sabrina's going to lose custody of the baby to her brother and sister-in-law," she says, in a resigned tone of voice that Sam knows all too well. 

She leans on the closed door. "At this point," she goes on, heavily, "given that after she got arrested on Saturday for getting into a physical altercation with her neighbour they found meth and heroin in her apartment, she may in fact get her parental rights terminated outright and the brother and sister-in-law will adopt - it's what her brother's been pushing for. And at this point there's nothing I can do but wait to see how the fallout's going to shape up." 

After a beat to let that sink in, Sam says, "Swap coffee for drinks?" 

"What a smart man you are," Laura replies. "I'll buy." 

 

The place they go to is pretty small, the kind of place that stays open on the strength of regulars and of people who are frankly relieved to walk into a place that isn't trying to deafen them with the radio. They slide into a booth after Sam orders a beer and a plate of nachos, and Laura orders a stiff Bloody Mary and warns him she'll pick at his nachos. 

"Wasn't she doing better for a while?" Sam asks, as Laura settles her purse. The bar also has a sane, balanced approach to AC, so it's a _pleasant_ temperature in here, instead of either too hot or freezing cold. 

Sabrina'd been one of his cases, at one point; when she'd gone off her medications for the pregnancy, and then run into the first round of trouble with her brother over the drinking she kept doing, Sam'd said something that struck her the wrong way, and she'd decided Sam was the enemy. 

That makes it pretty hard to help her, because everything gets filtered through the conviction that you're out to judge and punish her, so after a lot of careful discussion Laura'd taken over. And then as far as Sam's heard till now, that's gone pretty well. Laura's good with people stuck with struggles like Sabrina's. 

They've tried to avoid actually giving her a _formal_ diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, since it's the kind of thing that can do exactly what it's not supposed to and seriously lessen her chances of getting reasonable mental health support. They've stuck with putting the depression, generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder on paper, because it's more than enough to cover the treatment plans and interventions she needs - so far. 

It doesn't change anything about her care _here_ \- it just means that if and when she does go somewhere else, or if some administrative shit comes up they have to wrangle within the VA, she's not going with a black mark already on there. Sadly might get one there, once she's out of a space where Laura writes the formal diagnoses, but at least she won't be _going in_ that way. 

It shouldn't work like that and Sam hates that it does, but sometimes you have to work with what's in front of you. The diagnosis shouldn't be anything but a damn identification of what's wrong, and a guide to how to help, but a hell of a lot of the time it does the opposite. 

Makes even people who should fucking know better shut down right out of the gate, or even refuse to treat. 

And since no one person can do everything, while Sam will absolutely throw what support he's got behind all campaigns for education and admin changes and everything else to get this kind of shit sorted out, for now, he focuses on doing what he can with what he's got for the people in front of him. 

In this case, it means leaving Sabrina free of the label on her paperwork that might make her chances of getting help worse, instead of better. 

"Yes, but then she got conned into talking a call from her mother, after the baby was born," Laura sighs. 

Sam winces. That explains a lot.

The biggest thing he had actually succeeded with, when Sabrina was still working with him, had been to get her to at least agree to go no-contact with her parents. As with all these kinds of things, sometimes it didn't stick, but she'd tried. And she still tried. 

But it was hard, and said parents do everything they can to undermine it. 

"And it all went downhill from there. And of course then _because_ there was the baby . . ." Laura trails off, and makes a gesture of _there you go_ with her glass. 

"Right," and it's Sam's turn to sigh. "Instead of it being possible for the bender to be 'well that fucked up, let's try again', now her brother's Concerned and looking over her shoulder and probably getting CPS involved, and then it's the whole world's out to get her - " 

" - and it just keeps going," Laura agrees, sadly. "And it doesn't help that her brother's the one who's been _trying_ to get her to finish cutting contact with their parents for years." 

"He's not in contact with them at all?" Sam's actually pretty impressed, because that'd take work. And conviction. 

Sabrina's parents are the kind who don't _look_ that bad on paper, because they manage to wrap everything they do that's messed up in the language of Concern and make it look Proper. You have to get to know about the whole picture to realize how they fucked their kids up, and are still trying to keep on. And they're also persistent as goddamn hell, and when you put the two together it makes trying to get through to people about the _realities_ involved . . . well, pretty fucking hard. 

They were such damn Respectable Middle Class White People that they were good at getting perfectly well-meaning institutions to do their dirty work for them, too. Sam actually had to go have a conversation with the cops (who thank fuck were more reasonable than normal, maybe because they had better things to do than drive around to Sabrina's house _again_ ) about calling _him_ first if they got a call for a welfare check on Sabrina. 

Because otherwise Sabrina's damn parents sent them over there as often as they could, plausible every time, and it jacked Sabrina's paranoia and persecution up through the roof. And tended to make her willing to pick up the phone again, just to make the patrol visits stop. 

Laura's smile is completely without humour. "He's got a restraining order against their mother, and apparently when their father heard about it and drove down to have it out with the man, his wife met her father-in-law at the door in her patrol uniform, wearing her side-arm, told him to get off her property if he didn't want her to call her coworkers, and her father-in-law decided he had business elsewhere. And the wife also blocks their favourite nuisance technique. None of which helped Sabrina, of course, since - " 

" - yeah they turn around and dump all that frustration at her. Damn." Sam shakes his head, sighs again. "So it's not like he's got sympathy." 

"I don't know whether he has any sympathy or not," Laura says, also sighing again. "But he's got the compelling argument that given the pattern of being unable to maintain distance and the almost one-to-one correlation with drug-use and the times when she breaks down and lets them back in, and how they - naturally - stepped it up after the baby was born. . . ." 

She shrugs, sort of falls back against the backrest of her seat. "I think he's just done, honestly," she says, voice sad. "I think he hit own-life-mask-first a while ago, and I think he feels he's done all he can for her, but also that he's . . . not about to let his niece grow up in that. And I don't actually have a compelling argument to counter that with." 

Sam doesn't either: you can't actually sacrifice a baby on the altar of its mother's mental health, even if you're really pulling for the mother. 

"That's not going to end well," Sam says, quietly, and it's not. He almost feels like the best they can hope for is Sabrina just completely falling apart for a while but surviving. The other options -

Well. Presumably at least the brother and his wife have some idea of what to do if Sabrina decides to give parental abduction a try. Or something worse. 

For that matter he hopes they're ready for the baby's grandparents to sue for visitation. They've probably got no leg to stand on, and if Sam remembers correctly the brother's in Connecticut, and the grandparents have to provide "substantial burden of proof" that they're good for the kid and already have a meaningful relationship. And there's zero hope of that. 

But they'll still try. 

"How's she handling it?" he asks. Laura gives him an expression that tells him everything he needs to know, so he winces again, and has some more beer. 

"On the tiny, slender, fragile upside I don't have to do anything that outright pits me against what she wants," Laura replies. "They don't need me to give a recommendation or a comprehensive assessment. Nothing I can turn over is going to do her much good, mind you, but that can be their fault. I don't actually have to take that data, put it together and articulate an interpretation. That might be enough to keep her coming to see me, even after it blows up, and maybe we can get through that. I hope so." 

Sam nods. "Me too," he says, quietly. "Obviously, let me know what I can do." 

She sits back, and raises her glass. "So that's been my last few days, so-called weekend very much included," she says, wry. "Tell me about yours. Even if it's terrible, at least it's a change." 

Sam figures that's a fair assessment. He turns his glass from side to side for a second, looking at the beer inside and how it moves, and says, "You know, I don't even know if it's terrible or not." 

Laura's eyebrows go up. "That generally tends to mean it's not," she points out. "The terrible tends to be pretty loud." 

"That's a point," Sam agrees. 

He shifts, settling to lean his forearms on the table and taking another drink. "I didn't know what to expect - I didn't know even what to guess, you know?" 

Laura nods, tipping her glass again. "It's not like there's much precedent," she says, brightly. 

"Yeah, right," Sam agrees, wry. "I mean, I get updates, but I knew Steve's been on the defensive, I know he doesn't know that much about what he's doing yet, and I mean I have to keep in mind that his base paradigm comes straight out of 1945 and it's not like they were . . . great . . . with mental health understanding then. I don't even know he knows what to look for, what to tell me, you know?"

He spreads his hands, then goes on. "My 'secondary source' - " and Laura smiles slightly at the wry tone; she'd handed him the words when he floundered around about what to call Natasha without endlessly having to talk around her, " - said she didn't think Steve was outright lying to me about what was going on or anything, but she did say she thought he was spinning stuff. And like you said, I've got no model for this, you know?" 

"So?" Laura prompts, when Sam pauses, and he shrugs. 

"I'm still not sure. Or - " he corrects himself. "Maybe it's more like, I'm not sure and I almost don't want to jinx things, or take something for granted. Or something. Things are quiet. Seem stable - honestly stable," he qualifies. "Not, like, about to erupt stable, I mean things seem to be in a pattern that could stay for a while." 

He shrugs again and acknowledges the elephant in the room with, "No unsolved random murders in the paper, no major injuries or property damage. Steve says Barnes spends most of his time either in his room reading or on the couch reading, but Steve doesn't keep him in the building, he comes and goes when he wants to. Steve says he started looking stuff up about his past, Steve's past, but he really doesn't want Steve to tell him shit - says it's the first and only time he's been clear about asking or refusing anything, is telling Steve he didn't want to be told what he didn't remember." 

Sam folds his arms for a second, thinking, taking a couple breaths. "I think the thing that threw me most is - " he opens one hand, "- it's like Steve's a different person. But _not_ like you'd expect. Not . . . strung out, not wan or washed out or dulled under the weight, it's like - I mean I told him this too - it's like Milo with Teresa." 

Laura tilts her head. "So tired you're worried he doesn't know which way is up, liable to burst into tears because he spilled his coffee and he's just been getting that little sleep, and still clearly in the joyous centre of his life and lighting up like a neon search-light every time you give him half an opportunity to talk about the baby?" she supplies, the question-mark curling at the end. 

"Exactly like that," Sam agrees. "With a bit that's like the day Heather thought her son died in that huge damn accident when he was coming back from Toronto and then found out he 'only' broke both his legs and wrecked her car, except it's every day's like that." 

"Like you thought something so utterly horrible it was going to destroy you was true," Laura muses, "and since you found out it wasn't, everything else is a miracle, even if most people would think it was a catastrophe, just because it's not that thing. And you really feel like that, like the weight just went away." 

"Yeah," Sam confirms. "That. And I've got some seriously mixed feelings about that, because on the one hand when I met him he was the barely-walking wounded - apparently more than I even thought - and he really isn't anymore, and on the other I can now take as read he's got no sense of proportion or self-preservation or anything about this." 

Laura leans her chin on one hand and gives him one of the looks that reminds him she's almost twice his age, more than old enough to be his mother. "Sam," she says, fondly, "you used to jump out of airplanes into active combat zones to save people, and now you work in our office. Plus that thing with the stuff on that very exciting day," she adds, her favourite mock-oblique way of referencing DC-14. 

Sam makes a face at her and drinks more of his beer. She looks blandly innocent. 

"I'm just saying," she says, "there are people who would argue that you don't have a lot of ground to be dubious about other people's sense of self-preservation or proportion." 

"Which I acknowledged when I told him most of what I just told you about reminding me of Milo, with the part about the mixed feelings redacted," Sam retorts. "Or remixed, I guess - I mean I said I didn't necessarily completely understand it, but that my mom hated that I jumped out of airplanes, so I understand I don't need to." 

"Good call," Laura tells him. 

"Glad you approve," he returns, dryly. 

Then he sighs. Taking the cardboard coaster from underneath his beer, he turns it on its side and taps it on the table, frowning, before shrugging again. 

"I met Barnes," he says. "Very briefly. He was out sitting in the living-room reading a book when Steve took me by his place, and his response to Steve introducing me was more or less acknowledging my existence. Me and Steve sat out on the deck, talked for a while, when we came back in Barnes was in his room with the door mostly closed. I couldn't get much from him other than he's got the flattest affect I've ever seen and you know I've seen a lot." 

"Jesus," Laura murmurs. "Yes." 

"It was obviously important to him that I see him out in the living-room," Sam notes. "But I'm not sure why. Steve says the physical parts about food are better, but the psychological parts aren't, really, and he doesn't think the guy sleeps much and when he does it's wedged in the corner of the closet." He exhales in a huff. "So I dunno." 

"But," Sam goes on, before the pause actually invites Laura to speak, "I had a pretty interesting conversation with Tony Stark." 

Laura's eyebrows draw together and she purses her lips. "I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not right now," she admits. "And I've only had three quarters of one Bloody Mary, so it's not that." 

"No, it's not sarcastic," Sam clarifies, smiling slightly. "Maybe I'm still a bit bemused, though. I dunno if I can call him a complicated guy, exactly? It just sounds kinda . . . "

"Fatuous," Laura provides, firmly. "Absolutely fatuous. Every high-status white male on the planet who acts like an asshole in public gets called _complicated_ , and all it means is _we can't call him an asshole without blowback_." 

"Right," Sam agrees, "that, and on top of that I'm not sure it's complicated, exactly. I mean, having met him up close, I'm pretty sure he's . . . " 

Sam spreads his hands, shrugs and sighs. "Honestly a pretty fucking simple and straight-forward example of what happens when you've got a kid with a ridiculously high IQ and completely untreated ADHD, plus bad parenting, no boundaries, and then just sort of . . . start throwing trauma at him from age seventeen."

Something occurs to him and Sam adds, "Plus maybe add, like - I think he got sent to college when he wasn't even sixteen yet, by himself, in the 80s, so add - " 

"Oh god his psychosexual landscape is probably horrifying," Laura says, fascinated, which is pretty much what Sam was going for. 

They don't get a _lot_ of people at the VA who are coming out of the _other_ extreme end of economics; when the members of the country's elite get combat-related trauma they tend to hire private mental health professionals. But the VA does get get a few and frankly Sam thinks sometimes both ends end up with people just as fucked up as the other. 

And part of it's that sex is just as commodified and weaponised among the rich, except everyone pretends it's okay, because they're rich. 

The difference is they have the resources that mean they could sort their shit out and just . . . don't, usually. They just make everyone else deal with it. 

"You figure ADHD, from up close?" Laura asks, with the half-guilty fascination of armchair diagnosis. "With just the public stuff it's always been hard for me to choose between that and bipolar." 

"Pretty sure," Sam says. "As armchair shit goes. Because the thing is, right: for one, he's not actually _inaccurately_ grandiose. As far as I can tell, his assessments of his actual skills aren't exaggerated, they're dead accurate. He just happens to be fucking ludicrously smart. And when he's not performing it's also like he doesn't care. And when he _is_ performing it's because he hates everyone there, including himself, and he's using the status play to lash out. Doesn't make him any nicer to be around when he does it, I don't imagine - " 

"But different origin to the behaviour," Laura finishes for him, nodding thoughtfully. 

It's getting louder in the bar, but not too loud, and there's a few more people, but all still far enough away they can't hear. 

"Like he was talking about being able to make . . . something," Sam edits himself at sort of the last minute, and Laura gives him an amused look but lets it pass, "better than the USAF research-and-dev that made the original, but it wasn't like he was bragging. It was just something he planned to do. And the skills he doesn't have, he seems happy to admit. Weirdly happy to admit, in fact.

"But even over a couple of days," Sam concludes, "I could tell the guy's got two modes: hyperfocus to the point of ignoring basic self-care, and then his brain bouncing off every fucking surface available like a ping-pong ball with a jetpack - and I'm pretty sure his impulse control, on a scale of ten? It runs about from 2 to -700." 

"So what was the interesting conversation?" Laura asks, and she at least looks a bit more clinically intrigued and less resigned and sad than when she was talking about Sabrina. 

"It was kinda about that, actually," Sam says. He takes a second to glance up at the slowly moving circular fans on the ceiling, and turns the thought over in his head. "Impulse control, emotional regulation and development and stuff."

Laura's eyebrows go up, and Sam gives a sort of gesture of acknowledgement, because it's admittedly a little arcane as conversations with a layperson go. 

"So the thing is," Sam says, by way of filling that in, explaining, "since this stuff started the guy's been _obnoxiously_ insistent that Steve wasn't in any danger."

"I remember you mentioning," Laura says, with deliberate ironic understatement - since what she's actually remembering is Sam venting, that first conversation they had, about having to play "Riley pick up the goddamn phone" with Stark's answering machine. And then Stark's follow-up bullshit. 

"Right," Sam confirms. "Now, before I was pretty sure it was just because he was oblivious or maybe stupid about this kinda stuff - but it got really apparent to me that wasn't it, so I ended up asking him."

"I'm impressed by your directness," Laura says, and she has had most of her Bloody Mary at this point, so Sam also knows that it's a genuine compliment. He still gives her a slightly ironic salute. 

"And he was talking about how you can't look at anything Barnes does from the point of view of a . . . " 

Sam sort of waves his hand back and forth, like the idea is a thing he could grab and hold onto, trying to find maybe a different way of wording it. Then he gives up. 

"If I go through it like we did we'll be here all night so, just, lemme skip to the summary," he says. "Like you can't look at the guy with the expectations of a grownup. Even a really, really traumatized grownup, because even with adults who are a total goddamn mess - "

Laura gives the wordless gesture that acknowledges, well. Sabrina. And Sam nods. 

"Right," he says. "Because even them, they're . . . there's basic stuff developed enough that they can . . . well. Function, even if you're just talking enough to navigate surviving homeless, keep from getting killed your first day on the street. So about how not to look at the guy like an adult for that stuff. But like a kid."

Laura's nodding slowly. Sam goes on, "Like when a kid is so tired and worn out they can't _help_ having a tantrum, when your feelings and impulses are so big your consciousness is kinda like you're surfing on top of it. Except this guy's a really dangerous adult conditioned to kill people."

"Seems reasonable," Laura says, leaning her forearms on the table. "I seem to recall vaguely batting around a similar set of ideas, without much to hang it on." 

Sam acknowledges that with a hand turned up. "Right, we were talking about Perry and sensitization of stress-response symptoms and pervasive neural network damage. So Stark's argument is that there is absolutely no reason that the guy _shouldn't_ have managed to kill Steve any of the times he was trying, and since he didn't, it's not because he was trying really hard to do it and messed up - " 

"It's because he was driven to and really, really didn't want to," Laura finishes. " _Hnh._ "

They've both lowered their voices, so that they can both _just_ hear each other over the music and rumble of everyone else's conversation, eating, cooking, everything; you'd need to be in the booth with them to hear them. "And at this point the drive has been removed," she adds, thoughtfully. "The people who were controlling him are no longer a factor." 

"Right," Sam confirms. "And . . . he might be right. Stark, I mean. It does kind of fit the evidence." 

"It's suggestive, for sure," Laura agrees, pulling the olive off her garnish. "The pattern of behaviour you described is consistent with a very reluctant but cowed child - doing what you're told, but only to the bare minimum. Kick him off the helicarrier, but don't shoot. Disable you, but don't kill. And so on." 

"Exactly. I mean the comparison's kind of trivializing, but it's like the kid who really doesn't want to clean his bedroom, or knows he can't in the time he's given, or something, but is afraid of the consequences if he doesn't, so he goes through the motions, cuts corners - whatever." Sam waves it away and finishes his beer. 

He hesitates. "I mean that still leaves a fuck of a lot of - " he gestures mutely and Laura closes her eyes in acknowledgement, putting her glass near the edge of the table in case the waitress wants to come over and ask if she wants another. Sam puts his beer glass beside it. 

"I still don't necessarily agree," Sam finishes, "that all that isn't capable of getting just as bad as any push his former handlers could've given. That losing the structure, all of that shit, isn't gonna be bad enough to push things just as far. And I mean Natasha is _absolutely adamant_ ," he adds, "about Steve not actually _accepting_ being put in as the replacement authority figure - " 

"Oh _god_ no," Laura says, more intensely than Sam expects, and actually shudders. "Christ, no, he'd just . . . " she pauses and looks at him, like she's trying to assess him. For a second, Sam's not sure he can read what's on her face, other than it kind of looks like her _how do I explain this?_ expression, but . . . different. 

"Sam," she says, slowly, chewing on her lip. "You know I have . . .inexpressible amounts of respect for you, both personally and professionally, so I would very much like you not to take this question the wrong way but I'm not sure how else to ask it - you . . .do _realize_ how absolutely defenseless this man is, don't you? Particularly to your friend? The sheer extent of the vulnerability at play here? The _terrifying_ extent of the power differentials?" 

Sam . . . blinks at her. For several seconds. Long enough, in fact, for the waitress to come, confirm they both want another drink, and whisk away again, which is kind of a welcome intrusion. 

He wants to say _yes, obviously_ , but he does have enough respect for Laura's expertise to stop and consider why she might, well. Feel it necessary to ask. 

While he's still thinking, she says, "I know - I can imagine," she seems to correct herself, "that it could be . . . difficult to use that frame. You've been on the _direct_ receiving end of the capacity for physical violence and are appropriately aware of the danger represented by that kind of physical power with a corresponding emotional deregulation. And that is both compelling and an element that needs to be considered." 

She takes a deep breath. "But just . . . for a moment, put that away. Pretend he's . . . pretend he's, I don't know, an emaciated famine victim, and then imagine the same psychological state." 

Sam sits back in the booth and . . . considers that. Because it's Laura, he makes himself step on the immediate defensiveness and start listing the reasons that's not the way to look at it, that it doesn't change anything or doesn't apply, or even that he's already thought about that (because he has, a bit) and . . . considers it anyway. 

In case he hasn't thought about it enough. 

Because like he said to Stark: Laura's concern _has_ mostly been for Barnes, or at least articulated that way, and he's known it's a good perspective - after all, it's Barnes he needs help nailing down, for what might be going on inside his head. Steve is . . . it's not that Steve is simple, or shallow, or anything like that, but Sam _gets_ Steve. The places where what's going on with Steve isn't as familiar to Sam as the inside of his own head, Sam's still had _plenty_ of experience with figuring out how to understand it from people around him, and it's all . . .recognizable. 

But Laura's best tricks have always been with people who were so messed up that in some ways they don't even have a sense of self yet, who never had _anything_ to build it on in the first place, who had to work so hard just to survive that they didn't have any space for those fundamental roots you have to put down to get anywhere. It's why she's the one Sabrina moved to, because Sabrina's messed up like that, too. The sandbox piled stuff on top of that, sure, the stuff that took a hammer to even the fragile make-shift stuff she'd managed to work out up to that point, but the problem is that it was that fragile. 

There's a lot of people like that, among those who end up coming to the VA trying to figure out how not to fall completely apart. Not all of them, and sometimes not even the worst off, but plenty of people - 

Well. Sam's got plenty of his own issues, these days, with how the military recruits. When you recruit like that among the vulnerable, you get a lot more of the broken, because the vulnerable _get_ broken, even if they manage to cobble themselves together enough to keep going. 

It's not fair, in the kind of huge, all-encompassing not-fair that Madlen's good at looking at and attacking and that overwhelms Sam if he looks at it too much, so he tries to focus on what he can do, here and now. 

And what he can do, generally, here and now, is figure out how to help people get their shit together from here. And he's pretty good at it, he knows that. And Laura's been a good way to learn how to be better - and this is one of the ways. 

So he spins that around in his head one or two times like he's focusing a microscope or a telescope or something and thinks about it that way. Asks himself, okay: what if you did make everything the same, but make it so Barnes isn't dangerous, can't be dangerous. Take away all that extra strength and endurance and hell take away the training even, mentally make his body one that _can't_ hurt someone, even if he totally loses his shit. 

Not because that's not important, but because it's . . . at right angles to the point. 

Even if Barnes does that, and he might, Sam has to admit it . . . won't be in his own defense. It won't be to protect himself, not in a human way. No more than it's actually protecting yourself when someone sneaks up behind you and goes _boo_ and you jump. 

Sam thinks about . . . well, everything. Turns it over. Thinks about Barnes staying in the room Steve put him in, only coming out when Steve couldn't know, and how the only signs he came out were two things that probably overwhelmed him to the point he couldn't even touch them again. Thinks about Barnes taking the bare minimum of food, and yeah maybe some of that's about being sick all the time but it's also . . . trying to be invisible. 

If Steve hadn't told him he could eat, Sam wonders, would he have taken anything at all?

He thinks about Steve mentioning finding the metal bowl in the closet - realizes how Steve _probably_ found that while he was panicking Barnes wasn't going to come back, damn him - and how he figured that meant Barnes was trying to hide being sick. 

For that matter, he thinks about Steve's description of finding Barnes after he punched the walls up and instead of thinking about the broken furniture and the broken walls he . . . forces himself to kinda put that out of his mind. 

Focus on a man trying his best to clean up the blood with the tools he understood and then sitting there, with shit still in the cuts - and then actually the bit that jumps up and down and demands his attention isn't there, or Steve cleaning up, it's - 

It's Steve mentioning how it looked like Barnes was gonna go sit on the floor again, later, but then he stopped and sat on the bed, and thinking _ah, fuck._

He kind of wants to run that one by Natasha, ask for confirmation: _with that scenario, why do you figure he sat on the bed?_ Steve thought it was a good sign and to be fair Sam's not sure it's not a _good_ sign, but . . . 

He's pretty sure it was a sign Barnes saw Steve's unhappy look and acted accordingly. 

After he's thought about it for a few minutes, and Laura's waited with no sign of impatience but a bit of an unreadable look, Sam decides he doesn't actually want to articulate realizing _once again_ how much society really does train you to think of physical prowess as the first and foremost concern, and the biggest factor, and how somehow _body strength_ becomes _intentionality_ , becomes moral agency. 

Because he's fucking bored with it, but it does keep happening. And he of all people should know better. Fuck, Madlen'd probably give him shit for it, if she were here - _yeah, Samuel, because being big and looking bad is totally the antidote to being fucked up and vulnerable, right?_

Granted, here you can't take it out of the equation: it's like with dogs. A lap-dog that goes crazy sends you to the ER for stitches; a big pitbull can easily kill you. And that is a problem. 

But that doesn't make the lap-dog less crazy, and it doesn't make the pitbull _evil_ , or fundamentally worse than the lap-dog. You might have to handle the practicalities different but - 

It also makes him reassess the moment with Barnes on the couch, and now he's got the strong feeling it was . . . some kind of test. Maybe for Sam, maybe for Steve, maybe just to . . . check whether it was allowed. Whether it's okay to act like - well, like he lives there. 

Would sure explain how Barnes went back to the other room as fast as he could - even though the answer was clearly _yes_ , that'd be fucking terrifying to do. 

"You know," Sam says slowly, "I'm just saying, thinking that all the way through all over again just makes the whole goddamn thing a hundred percent more depressing and anxious-making, so thank you, I appreciate it." He sighs and leans forward to lean his arms on the table. "But yeah, I get what you mean." 

The waitress brings his nachos and their second drinks, and Sam pushes the nachos towards Laura a bit to show there's no hard feelings. 

"Anyway," Sam goes on, when the waitress is gone, "Natasha's also adamant that if Steve lets Barnes just put him into that framework, even if he himself doesn't take it on on purpose, it'll also explode pretty fast and end really badly." 

Laura's pulled some of the nachos onto a napkin. "She's probably not wrong," she acknowledges. "I think the developmentally-young child example's not a bad one, same reason - he did crack conditioning, after all, so clearly there's _some_ sense of something being so bad that even fear of punishment and desperation for approval wasn't enough. Right now, what's happening is also clearly a better option, but since he's _rejected_ the people who made him, and probably has no capacity to understand nuance, if someone steps into that role and then . . . does _anything_ that makes him the wrong kind of afraid . . . " 

Laura mimes a crashing plane, or missile, or something, with her nacho. Sam nods. "Yeah, I can see it," he agrees. _God-damn it,_ he thinks. 

She takes a bite and tilts her head again. "How's your friend going to handle that?" she asks, voice neutral. 

Sam eats a nacho or two before he answers, and says, almost to his own surprise, "Actually that might be some good news?" and appreciates that it's Laura's turn to blink. 

"Because the thing is - they grew up together, right," he explains. "Since they were kids. Like . . . six years old, something like that. Except, and this is the important part: Barnes was older than Steve. Is older than him, I guess, although . . . I don't even fucking know how you'd count time, between Steve in the ice and the way they froze Barnes and thawed him out." 

He gets a bit distracted, then shakes it off, takes a drink of his new beer. 

"And he was the healthy one, the . . .well, popular one, all of that," he continues, picking his next nacho. "Steve grew up constantly sick and stuff. Barnes was the one who kept him from getting beat to death when he went picking fights he couldn't handle, Barnes was the one who snuck food in when stuff was hard, or came and helped him keep up with stuff from school when he was sick, or stayed to keep an eye on him if Steve's mom had to work, Barnes was the one who gave him somewhere to live when his mom died - all of that stuff. This is Steve's best friend who was his _big_ brother, not his little one." 

He pauses to acknowledge, "Which has its own risks, I know, but at least it's not - " 

" - that he'll slide naturally into a dominance posture," Laura finishes, by way of agreement. 

"If anything the opposite," Sam muses. "And I mean he's handling that part pretty well but now I think about it, it's pretty clear that for Steve the _natural_ order of the universe is, this is the guy he looked up to, this is the guy who gives him shit and follows him everywhere, not because Steve's some kind of great leader, but because he knows if he doesn't Steve's going to get his ass killed and the only way to stop Steve running off and doing something stupid is . . . well, you can't, and still have him be Steve." 

"That might be a good thing," Laura says, thoughtfully. "You're right." Then she adds, "I am also now _completely unsurprised_ he's got no sense of proportion, Sam, for the record." 

"Yeah me either," Sam admits. "That stuff was new knowledge, by the way - Steve shared after he figured out I'd officially given up on any intention to argue with him about whether he should be doing this. I feel like I can also say, for absolute certain, that without this guy Captain America wouldn't exist." 

A few more nachos, both of them quiet and Laura eating more than just a few - which Sam had anticipated, since she probably skipped lunch - and then Sam shrugs one more time. 

"Fortunately," he says, "turns out Steve was mostly telling me the truth anyway, he was just leaving out how he's tired out of his mind, terrified things are going to go wrong, that kind of stuff. And the other upside is I . . . couldn't really see anything he was doing wrong. I mean with this kind of stuff, at this kind of stage, you're just kinda . . . ." Sam trails off. 

Laura makes an _mmm_ noise. "Working to establish a new continuity of 'normal' in which horrific things don't happen every other day, normal needs are provided for without horrible prices or penalties and so on and so forth," she supplies. "Well," and she flashes him a thin smile as she pulls two big clumps of nachos apart, "I can certainly see why you texted to ask me about the parents." 

"Oh no," Sam tells her, wryly, "that was an extra bit of fun where Dr Ross called Steve over to let him know that Barnes' prosthetic is probably causing him consistent and persistent neuropathic pain as well as probably fucking over his muscle alignment and stuff, which of course makes for even more pain. And as we know, pain is great for mental health, but Steve's also pretty sure he can't say shit about it yet without setting off some bad shit, so nobody can do anything about it. There was . . . some expressions." 

Laura covers her face with her hands, briefly, as her only comment. 

"Yeah," Sam says. He hesitates, and then figures he might as well, so he adds, "On the upside, I've been made aware that anyone trying to actually mess with them is going to be doing it through Stark Industries, including Stark Security straight down to 'we're denying you physical entry into this building to apprehend them' kinda thing, and Stark Industries can move them pretty much anywhere in the world, so that's . . .kind of reassuring." 

"It is," Laura agrees. And then after a beat she adds, "But Sam?" 

He looks at her, quizzical, and she's got her Very Serious Face on. 

"I will deeply resent it," Laura informs him, "if HYDRA has turned the world into a place where the only check on the paranoid corruption of the governance of this nation is the altruism of a major capitalist corporation. I just want you to know that." 

Sam snorts into his beer. 

 

He drives her home, since two beers is not enough to put him over the limit, but two Bloody Marys is absolutely enough to make her unsafe to drive. She says she'll get a cab in to work tomorrow morning, but doesn't have to mention she'd rather not deal with a taxi right now.

As Laura gets out in her driveway, she stops and says, "Sam?" And when he glances at her, she says, "You're an amazing person, and a very good friend. And very, very good at what you do. I think you should probably hear that more often." 

Sam smiles slightly and says, "You're a kind of cheap date, Laura," all of it gentle teasing. 

"Mmm, no," she says, her head on one side, and the look that does in fact say she's more than sober enough to be choosing her responses pretty carefully. "I'd still say the same thing if I'd had nothing to drink. It'd just be more awkward, because you couldn't deflect. But I am serious, Sam. And I hope your friend realizes how much he owes you. Or would, if you'd ever count the costs." 

"You know, this is not usually the kind of thing you say this about," Sam tells her, gravely, "but you sound exactly like my ex." 

Laura laughs out loud, something she doesn't do often. "Well I will take that as all the praise one could possibly get," she says. "Good night, Sam. Thank you for the ride." 

 

When Sam gets home he considers emailing Natasha about the conversation, especially about the bed, sitting on it, that stuff. But he decides that it wouldn't really do much. Except maybe upset her and stress her out. Months later, they're kind of at a stage where Steve either fucked that one up or he didn't, or he did but it doesn't matter, and they'll find out in the time to come. 

And considering she and Barton not only did his basement but appear to have left his house completely clean, plus there's a note to say that his laundry is in the dryer, it'd probably be mean to stress her out. Sam's still not sure how it's physically possible for two people to have finished the entire basement and the shed in the garage in one long weekend, but it apparently happened. He'd be lying if he said it wasn't kind of a relief. He'd be lying if he said the laundry wasn't kind of a relief. 

One of the downsides of living alone is there's _never_ anyone to pick up any slack. Just you. 

Sam glances at the clock, and struggles with himself for a minute before deciding that nine-thirty is, in fact, too late to call Madlen because if nothing else she'll be convinced it's an emergency when she picks up and also she's up at oh-god o'clock all the time. Instead he texts Cara just to ask how she is, and Corinne because it's been a day or two since she said anything. 

Cara texts back that she's fine, just setting things up for the morning; Corrine texts him back a desk covered in school books and _KILL. ME._ plus a thousand (okay maybe twenty) x-eyed emoji. 

Sam grimaces. That's one area he and Cara definitely differ, and where he's got to watch what he says, for now: Cara's really into the private school she's got Corinne in, and it's one of the ones that thinks somehow education is defined by homework. Whereas Sam's got a pile full of papers and studies about how homework is the worst thing, _just waiting_ for the day Cara starts to waver and realizes that's one of the worst teaching strategies ever. 

It'll happen, probably pretty soon. But it hasn't yet. 

He texts Corinne back _i believe in you!_ and exchanges a few more back and forth with Cara that aren't really about their content, but more about saying that they're both still alive, still thinking about the other, and hope the other is okay. 

Then Sam makes himself some warm milk with a shot of Kahlua and goes to bed.


End file.
